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Preview: Naseer Shamma and Al-Oyoun Ensemble to visit Cleveland Museum of Art

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by Mike Telin

Shamma-NaseerThere is no one path that leads a musician to choose their instrument. But for Iraqi oud virtuoso Naseer Shamma it might have been predestination. “At five years old I asked my family to send me to a teacher to learn the oud,” Naseer Shamma told us by telephone from his hotel in New York. “They told me you are a child, the oud is for old people. You can play accordion or guitar. But I said no! I want to play the oud. I don’t know why.”

On Friday, March 15 beginning at 7:30pm in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium, Naseer Shamma & Al-Oyoun Ensemble will make their Cleveland debut as part of the museum’s VIVA! & Gala series. The concert is part of Shamma and his ensemble’s first US tour in over a decade which includes stops in Washington DC, New York City and Columbus. [Read more…]

Preview: CMA VIVA! & Gala: The Idan Raichel Project

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by Mike Telin

RecentlyRaichel voted Israel’s musician of the decade, musician, composer and producer Idan Raichel exemplifies the term World Music. On Saturday, February 16 beginning at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s VIVA! & Gala series presents The Idan Raichel Project. During the past ten years Raichel has worked with nearly 100 different musicians and singers from around the globe. “Each album has different bands and different styles,” Raichel explained during a telephone conversation from his home in Tel Aviv. “We’ll have a seven member group and will explore many songs and their rhythms.”

Born in Kfar Saba, Israel, in 1977 to a family with Eastern European roots, Idan Raichel began playing the accordion at the age of nine, and somehow always found himself attracted to Gypsy music and Tango. During high school he played keyboards and studied jazz and while serving in the military he joined the Army rock band and toured military bases performing covers of Israeli and European pop songs. [Read more…]

Preview: CMA VIVA! & Gala: Chanticleer to sing on January 30 in the museum’s new atrium

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by Mike Telin

CalledCHANTICLEER “the world’s reigning male chorus” by the New Yorker, Chanticleer brings their 35th Anniversary concert tour to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s VIVA! & Gala series on Wednesday, January 30, beginning at 7:30 pm. The concert titled A Siren’s Call, is an evening of seductive and irresistible songs of the sirens—sometimes fateful, sometimes fatal, will be performed in the newly opened Ames Family Atrium and is presented in conjunction with the opening of the Renaissance galleries.

We spoke to Chanticleer’s interim music director, Jace Wittig, by telephone from his office in San Francisco. [Read more…]

Review: Kronos Quartet at Cleveland Museum of Art (January 18)

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by Daniel Hathaway

“Eclectic”Kronos-Quartet doesn’t begin to describe the musical tastes of the Kronos Quartet. “Omniludic” (we just made that up) would be more like it. Musical omnivores, the Kronos are ready and eager to play music of any genre, and violinists David Harrington and John Sherba and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler have the technical and stylistic chops to do that — and to moonlight on a few other instruments too.

In their wide-ranging program in Gartner Auditorium of the Cleveland Museum of Art on January 18, the Kronos Quartet offered compelling performances of works by Bryce Dessner, Ram Narayan, Dan Becker (a first performance), Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Omar Souleyman and Aleksandra Vrebalov, plus arrangements of Vietnamese and Swedish tunes, to a large and rapt audience. [Read more…]

Review: Tri-C Classical Piano Series: Hugues LeClère at Cleveland Museum of Art (November 11)

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by Guytano Parks

ViolinistLECLERE-Hugues Joshua Bell describes his Gibson Stradivarius as an amazing instrument which enables him to express in his performances a multitude of nuanced shades and dynamics, much like an artist blessed with an immense cache of colors with which to paint. Likewise, pianists marvel at the expressive tonal and dynamic range of the Steinway. When a master sets his fingers to the keyboard, beauty, art and intelligence abound. Such was the case on Sunday afternoon, November 11 when the esteemed French pianist Hugues LeClère performed an innovative and masterly recital in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth entitled Debussy, Poet of the Avant-Garde in Gartner Auditorium at The Cleveland Museum of Art as part of the Cuyahoga Community College Classical Piano Series. [Read more…]

Frederic Rzewski plays Rzewiski & Mendelssohn on Cleveland Museum of Art series March 19

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by Daniel Hathaway

Composer-pianist Frederic Rzewski, who has embraced experimental and classical music with equal enthusiasm throughout his career, comes to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Friday, March 19 to play Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words and his own The People United Will Never Be Defeated. We reached him by phone at his hotel in Los Angeles.

Daniel Hathaway: You studied at Harvard with Walter Piston and Randall Thompson? Was there a certain moment when you made a switch in your musical style?

Frederic Rzewski: I hope at least one moment, probably many.

DH: But it’s a long way from Walter Piston and Randall Thompson to what you’re doing now.

FR: Well, I never wrote music like Randall Thompson or Walter Piston. But especially Randall Thompson was important to me. He was my teacher of counterpoint — modal counterpoint. And I think a very good teacher, also. He certainly understood and loved it, which seemed to me the most important thing about teaching counter-point: you actually have to love it. It can be very boring. But one thing I remember about that class is that he made us sing our exercises. It wasn’t enough to write them — we had to sing them. He always insisted on that.

DH: That might have been painful for some people to do.

FR: No, I don’t think so. But for him it was important. Of course, he wrote all this choral music, so he understood it from the inside — it wasn’t just a dry academic exercise. [Read more…]

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